March 28, 2007

Even a Broken Watch

…is right twice a day.

I was amused when following PZ’s link (from his post today) to the creationist Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views page. If you plough through all the whining about how evolutionists haven’t answered Michael Egnor’s questions about how Darwinian mechanisms can produce truly novel biological information (except they have), and if you ignore the fact that Egnor hasn’t answered Orac’s questions to Michael Egnor, right at the bottom of the page they have this:

The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site.

Exactly! For once, something we can all agree on. Although maybe not in quite the way they intended.

The way that the word "even" is used in this phrase is to emphasize something surprising or extreme (stolen from OSX thesaurus). The two poles of possibility are: A watch set to the correct time that is neither fast nor slow, and a watch that is broken and doesn't change state.

This seems to be the gist of this saying. As pointed out in a previous comment, there are other states that a timepiece can have. It could run slow or fast, or it could be set to the wrong time.

If a calibrated clock is set to 30 minutes before the current time - it is always wrong. If it runs fast or slow, it is right every once in a while. It doesn't seem that the math required to figure out the pattern of interference between a uncalibrated timepiece and reality would be. I pose a guess that a stopped watch would fall somewhere in the middle of the other possibilities.

If the point of the saying is merely to point out that it is surprising that a stopped watch happens to be right twice a day - then burn me at the stake for not being surprised and thinking that it's not worth constantly repeating.

Someone is easily annoyed. The saying makes sense: it is common knowledge that broken clocks are useless for telling time, and yet they are correct at two points in time during the day. The point is that it is wrong the vast majority of the time. But even so, it is correct at two points during the day. Of course this isn't surprising to someone who understands how watches tell time. The whole point is pointing out that even something so frequently wrong as a broken watch is more often right than X (where in this case X=Egnor).

If this bothers you, you need to get away from your Mac and start conversing with real people.